[amm]

Degrees only matter for "serious companies" and are used as a filter by often clueless HR employees without technical background. As long as you can prove practical experience, you should be fine.

Your network, on the other hand, becomes more important as you get older. Hiring an unknown person in his/her 40s or 50s has a much lower risk/reward ratio than hiring a random developer in his 20s who will a) do whatever you tell him without questioning anything b) work himself to death and c) work for almost no compensation.

Stay away from oDesk and online freelancing in general. Most of what's outsourced online is low skill, low risk and low reward work (landing pages, analytics integration, etc). Almost everyone can do it, so suddenly you're competing with everyone on the planet instead of just a couple of 100-1000 freelancers in your city. One of your biggest advantages over 2nd/3rd world freelancers is your location, language proficiency and cultural background. Use it to your advantage.

Also, hiring is really tricky. No one has really figured out how to do it right and so you have these hiring rituals with IQ tests, personality tests, weird screening procedures etc. In the end no one wins, because interviewees have gotten insanely good at playing the hiring game and employers have become overly careful just not to hire a random guy who will mess up their code base in 6 months and then leave for the next gig.

My personal advice to the OP: if there are tech/startup/... meetups in your region, go there. It's a good starting point and it's fun most of the time! You can get to know some interesting people and that might open some doors!

Best of luck, if you're reading this!

[eitally]

One of the biggest problems -- speaking as a former technical hiring manager myself -- is that a lot of those "serious companies" have HR policies that explicitly forbid hiring managers from pursuing candidates on their own. They are 100% at the mercy of whatever recruiters find for them, which is an awwwwwwwful, horrendous situation.

[brianwawok]

Really? All the big corps I worked at had a referral program. Friend want a job? Send his resume to HR. If he got hired, some kind of referral bonus (500 to 5000 depending on job market)

Not the same as a direct hire of a friend but I know referrals were assumed better qualified than a random who applied online.

[vvanders]

Not always true, I work for a fairly "serious" company without a degree.

What many other posters here has said is true, you need relevant experience in place of the degree. This is either projects you've worked on or jobs that are appropriate.

[imauld]

I'm surprised I got this far down the page before someone mentioned going to meetup's.